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I agree with all of this. The quick version, for people who don’t want to take time to watch the video is this:

Creators put videos on YouTube, and they get ad-revenue based on views.

Other people/companies/etc take popular videos from YouTube and post them (in Facebook video format) onto their own Facebook page.

Creators don’t like this, because it deprives them of ad-revenue, popularity, and allows other people (on Facebook) to get the benefits of their videos (growing their own brand, increased popularity of their Facebook page, allowing them to sell other products, etc).

I was listening to a recent Point Of Inquiry podcast titled The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, where Dan Ariely explained some of the research he’s done into honesty and dishonesty.

For example, in one test, he asked people to complete a math test. Then, they were to grade their own test, put the paper into a paper shredder, and tell the researcher how many questions they got right. They would be paid one dollar for each correct answer. What he didn’t tell them was that the paper shredder was fake – they could retrieve the test and check how many questions were actually correct. What Ariely found was that the average number reported on the test was “6 correct”, but the average number of actual right answers was 4. This discrepancy wasn’t due to a small number of big cheaters. Instead, it was due to a large number of small cheaters. More specifically, out of the 30,000 people involved in his study, 12 people were big cheaters, 18,000 people (or 60%) were small cheaters, and the remaining 12,000 (40%) didn’t cheat.

One theory for the why people cheated only a little bit was that people have two opposing forces in their heads: they want to see themselves as good people and, on the other hand, they have a selfish desire to work for their own interests. So, people cheat in small ways – cheating to get an advantage, but cheating only a little bit so that they can maintain an idea of themselves as “good people”.Continue reading →

I was over at a friend’s place tonight, helping her put together decorations for a party this weekend. Since we could focus on watching a movie and working on decorations at the same time, we decided to watch a movie.

Unfortunately, the guy had torrented it off the internet. (He said he felt a little guilty about it – referring to it as “stealing” off the internet.) Piracy really bothers me, so what did I do? After I got home, I rented the movie on Amazon.com to make sure the proper people got paid for their work. Four dollars is certainly worth the price of a clear conscience.

I stumbled on this interesting graphic the other day. They looked at per-capita spending on music in the United States and adjusted for inflation. I think this is interesting on a few levels. First, it shows how the move to digital sales hasn’t rescued the music industry (despite the occasional claim that ‘if you give people a chance to buy it digitally, people will pay’). The movie industry has also taken a hit over the past ten years (a slight decline in box-office revenue of about 15% or so, and a larger decline in DVD sales and rentals). While I think these declines can be traced (at least in part) to piracy, I do wonder why the games industry hasn’t seen a similar hit, though I can think of a few factors that might be affecting things: the increased danger and difficultly of pirating games on consoles (e.g. the XBox requires a mod-chip and you can still get kicked off the Microsoft network, the PS3 wasn’t cracked for years), the increased danger of pirating software (because malevolent software is far more dangerous, since it can infect your computer with viruses), the music industry was generally pretty nasty and unlikeable, the money spent on music wasn’t seen as going to the artist but going to the rich “suits” at the top.

See if you can guess where on this chart Napster was released.

This also makes me think of other issues, like: what is “enough” money needed to sustain an industry, versus when artists/creators are overpaid. Software is something that increases the number of workers (i.e. costs and functionality) as more money comes in. Movies are a bit similar to software, in that, the more money that comes in, the more money is spent creating elaborate special effects. It’s harder to argue that music gets better if a band is paid $1 million versus $20 million a year.

One of the coffeeshops I go to had their internet down the other day. Their ISP had cut them off temporarily because of filesharing going on there. Over the past few months, their network has been down several times because of this. One employee said the coffeeshop owner had been getting warnings and lists of pirated material going over his network, but he ignored it. Apparently, they’re supposed to setup a computer to filter what stuff is accessible over their network. Once they get that up and running in a few days, their ISP will give them a slower internet service and put them on “probation”. At least it didn’t seem to hurt the coffeeshop’s business; they were pretty packed.

It’s kind of too bad that coffeeshops end up being responsible for things their users are doing. I was sort of wondering how this would play out with piracy, because, while ISPs can cutoff people’s home internet, it’s harder for coffeeshops because they can’t really monitor what their users are doing and there’s so many different people that some of them will be filesharing. The website filtering system is something I hadn’t thought of, though.

On a similar note, I noticed that when I connect to the Starbucks internet, a screen briefly appears showing the MAC address of my computer. (The MAC address is a unique number contained inside your network hardware.) I couldn’t help but think that maybe they were linking people’s MAC addresses to their internet surfing. Theoretically, this could allow them to ban your computer from all the Starbucks. Your MAC address never changes, not even if you install a new hard drive and Operating System. (I guess that’s not entirely true. You could buy a new network card, though most people aren’t going to do that.) I sort of wonder if Starbucks has been banning people for pirating. Afterall, if the ISPs are cutting off service to coffeeshops for filesharing, then Starbucks might be protecting itself from ISP cutoffs by banning the offenders’ laptops.

I tried again today to pirate my own game. I was hoping I could manage to avoid a virus this time. I went around and around, visiting dozens of sites. One site, I managed to download a 200+ MB file that was “cracked”. Once I unpacked the rar file, I had a whole bunch of compressed files that I didn’t know what to do with. Most of the other sites I visited required that I sign-up before I could download the file. (They don’t tell you this until you go through a few steps; obviously, they’re using it to drive sign-ups to their site. No idea if they wanted to charge money.) I still remember one pirate site that gave a download description that said the game was “uninspired” (heh, thanks for pirating it and panning it at the same time). At least another pirated copy included the suggestion that “if you like the game, buy it”.

I don’t have any bittorrent software installed on any of my computers, so couldn’t try any torrents. Trying to find a usable copy was a huge headache. It seems like I spent over an hour looking around and ended up with nothing. I eventually just gave up.

While I tend to come down hard on piracy and pro-piracy arguments, I wasn’t really angry when I was looking around for pirated copies. (Strangely, I was angry when I saw that guy at the coffeeshop cracking iPhones and installing pirated apps for people; and none of that piracy involved my own software.) My attitude was more just kind of an apathetic “meh, these things happen” with a curiosity about whether or not they actually have a cracked copy. Part of my annoyance with piracy is just the fact that pirate justifications are so bad. Also, the game’s been out for a year, so it seems like a lot of people who were going to buy the game, have already.

I was looking over some numbers today, and a few things stuck out for me. First, I noticed something on the Empires of Steel video. If you look at the YouTube view statistics, here’s what you’d see:

See the big spike of views on September 11th and about a week afterward, and that the sites embedding the video are pirate sites? The number of views jumped from around 5,000 to 15,000 within a week. I happened to check some of the update numbers around that time, and there was a big spike in the number of people getting updates beginning on September 11th and continuing for a few weeks afterward. Obviously, the game was cracked around September 11th.

It would’ve been interesting if there was a spike in sales following the same pattern, but there wasn’t. September and the following month were really bad months for sales. As you could see from the chart I posted a few days ago (and reposted below), September was the fourth worst month for sales over the past twelve months, and October was the 2nd worst month for sales. I don’t really think piracy was the reason for the low sales over those months, since that would suggest that “would be buyers” opted for piracy, instead. I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t know.

I’ve been signed up for Empires of Steel Google Alerts for a long time now. (For those who aren’t familiar with Google Alerts, you can sign up be notified via email whenever google indexes something matching that search criteria. This lets you know anytime something new appears on the internet.) Well, thanks to Google Alerts, I’ve been noticing what appeared to be pirated copies of Empires of Steel showing up on warez sites. One thing I noticed, though, was that the download size was all wrong – which made me suspicious of whether these were actual pirated copies – as opposed to trojans or copies of the demo. For fear of viruses, I didn’t have the courage to actually visit the sites and download the game to see if it was the full game.

Recently, I got my old laptop back from a friend who was borrowing it. So, I thought, “Why not try it with my old laptop? I’ll reinstall the OS immediately after I try it – that’ll fix the problem of getting a virus.” Today, I tried it. I did a google search for “Empires of Steel”, searching for any free downloads on warez sites. Before I even finished the download, I had obviously been infected by a virus. There was a fake anti-virus program that had installed itself on my computer. Whenever I tried to open any application – even MSPaint – my computer would give me an error saying that the file contained a virus, and I could update my virus protection using their antivirus program. It was obviously a scam to get me to pay them money for “virus protection”. Also, when I attempted to go anywhere on the internet, the “anti-virus” program would stop the connection and tell me that the website was infected and they could fix it. It installed itself into the list of startup programs, so a restart didn’t fix anything. My computer was under the complete control of a virus before I even finished downloading a single pirated copy of my game. And I don’t even know for sure that the website had a pirated copy – maybe it was a garbage file with the name “Empires of Steel” so that they could trap people with their “anti-virus” scam.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt, following up on yesterday’s announcement of the 1.5 million dollar verdict against Jammie Thomas:

“This week a federal jury handed down the verdict in the third file-sharing trial against a Minnesota mother of four who has been fighting against the charges brought by the RIAA since 2005. Understandably, a lot of people are outraged by this verdict and while reading through comments about the fine on some online forums, I saw some interesting opinions on how these fines should be assessed. The point that $62,500 per song is excessively high seems to be something that everyone can agree on, but what actually is fair seems to be a big point of contention.”(Link)

While I think this is a reasonable question, and think the penalties are absurdly large, Slashdot quickly descended into a chorus of “there should be no penalty; piracy should be legal” arguments with other people voting them up. It’s irritating and frightening to see technology sites decend into this kind of nonsense. It’s like being a store owner and seeing a majority of people arguing that they feel completely justified stealing everything they want from stores [insert thin justification here] – oblivious to the consequences to stores or society. Even worse, I sort of feel a kinship with tech-savy people, so it feels like a betrayal by people who should know better.

What I find most odd about the whole thing is how their judgment changes when some company benefits from piracy. Two days ago, there was a story on Slashdot about a cookbook that took a recipe from the internet. When this was discovered, the company responded with “everything on the internet is public domain; we did the original author a favor”. People weren’t too happy about a company earning money by taking a recipe from an individual and selling it. Yet, so many of the comments in the “Considering a Fair Penalty For Illegal File-sharing” article work equally well to argue for the company’s “right” to take and print up someone else’s recipe.

Some examples:

You are the fool that allows an idiotic fine like this to happen. Pirating music is not like stealing cars. I’ll repeat: pirating music is not like stealing cars. When I download a torrent, NO ONE LOSES ANYTHING. The publishing company doesnt end up with one less copy of the album on their hard drives, the artist doesnt lose the ability to play the song. I would never have paid for that album, and no one who downloads through me would pay for it either. No one loses anything. (Link)

Put into the context of taking someone’s copyrighted material and selling it (as the cookbook creator did):

You are the fool that allows an idiotic fine like this to happen. Pirating [recipes] is not like stealing cars. I’ll repeat: pirating [recipes] is not like stealing cars. When I put [someone else’s recipe in my cookbook], NO ONE LOSES ANYTHING. The [cook] doesnt end up with one less copy of the [the recipe] on their hard drives, the [cook] doesnt lose the ability to [make the recipe]. I would never have paid for that [recipe], and no one who [reads my cookbook] through me would pay for it either. No one loses anything.

Slashdot:

Just because they downloaded does not mean that the product is worth paying for. Besides, this is completely irrelevant. Logically, pirates take nothing from anyone. The only argument that I’ve ever seen (and it’s a terrible one) is the “potential profit” argument. But, really, it’s impossible to steal money that only exists in the future of an alternate dimension where the artist/business made more money. Also, everyone in existence is ‘guilty’ of ‘stealing’ profit that others could, potentially, have had (you ‘deprive’ someone of potential profit merely by choosing not to buy a product). Our illogical capitalistic society is what needs fixing. (Link)

Put into the context of taking someone’s copyrighted material and selling it (as the cookbook creator did):

Just because [the cookbook creator used the recipe] does not mean that the [recipe] is worth paying for. Besides, this is completely irrelevant. Logically, pirates [like the cookbook creator] take nothing from anyone. The only argument that I’ve ever seen (and it’s a terrible one) is the “potential profit” argument. But, really, it’s impossible to steal money that only exists in the future of an alternate dimension where the artist/business made more money. Also, everyone in existence is ‘guilty’ of ‘stealing’ profit that others could, potentially, have had (you ‘deprive’ someone of potential profit merely by choosing not to buy a product). Our illogical capitalistic society is what needs fixing.

This would mean, of course, that the original creator of the recipe (or any writing, music, software, movie, etc) has no grounds to complain if some company takes their work and sells it.

Slashdot:

Has it occurred to you that you are proposing the destruction of the value of human labor on a massive scale?
Nonsense….
That’s what a labor market is like; you get paid for your actual labor, not the fruits thereof, or all the value that the fruits might yield.
If authors cannot sell many copies of their book (the fruit of labor) because people just copy the few that were sold, and then copy the copies, and so on, they’ll just change models or get a better job. Perhaps an author will demand payment up front — $10 per hour of writing, or something — and find that it works better, since no one yet knows how to copy him. (Link)

Put into the context of taking someone’s copyrighted material and selling it (as the cookbook creator did):

It’s perfectly okay for the cookbook publisher to take the recipe or any text written by any author, put it into a book and sell it. The original author should “get paid for your actual labor, not the fruits thereof, or all the value that the fruits might yield”.

How silly that a “lawyer”, of all people, can’t see through the illogicalness of his own statement.

Of course, this can be generalized to a lot more than cookbook recipes – the ultimate outcome being that companies can sell copies of music, books, music, whatever they want because “copying isn’t theft”, and “you can’t prove anyone would’ve bought it (at full price)”. At least there were a lot of comments in the cookbook article attacking slashdotters for their double-standard. Personally, I think the distinction between “free piracy” and “pirate and sell” is a bit of an arbitrary distinction, since most of the consequences are the same.

Tonight at a local Starbucks, I realized the guy across the table from me was charging people to jailbreak their iPhones and install an application that would let them to pirate all their iPhone apps. He obviously set it up beforehand, because I saw a half dozen people come in and pay him $30 or $40 for each phone. Gee, that’s lovely. He pulled down around $200 in less than an hour. I felt like confronting him and his “customers”.

I’m obviously in the wrong business. Creating stuff for people is for suckers, the real money is in helping people screw over software developers. I would’ve taken a video of the whole thing and added it to this post, but my camera battery was completely dead.